Vacumn Flowers

“More wine.” Khadijah rapped the table.

Somehow Rebel and Khadijah were reeling down an empty street, holding each other up. They must’ve passed some threshold point because Rebel had completely lost track of the last however-long-it-was. “A wizard’s daughter” she explained. “Well, first of all, you know what a wizard is, right?”

“No,” Khadijah said. There were dried tear tracks on her face. “Hell, I knew he was never going to stay.”

“A wizard is like a real crackerjack bioengineer. I mean, these guys are as rare as let’s say Rembrandt. They’re the ones with the creative juice to make the biological arts sit up and beg. Out in the comets they have a lot of status. But they tend to be jealous about their skills. Talented, but suspicious.”

“Never trust a man whose fingers are longer than his cock.”

“So when they need a messenger they can trust, they’ll decant a cloned self and program her up into their own persona. Now, ordinarily identity… drifts, you know? So a wizard’s daughter persona isn’t a straight copy; it’s altered so that she’ll retain identity with the wizard practically forever. They call that integrity. I don’t know how it’s done—only my mother self knows that. But anyway, I’m a wizard’s daughter. Her message is safe with me.”

“So what’s the message?” Khadijah asked.

“I don’t remember.”

They looked at each other. Then they both bent over laughing, grabbing at each other’s shoulders and forearms to keep from falling, leaning forward until their foreheads touched.

They had just pulled themselves together when a line of Comprise, no more than twenty units long, walked by in locked step, headed for the waterfront. They wore identical grey coveralls with that same familiar pigtail bobbing from each head. A dozen spheres of ball lightning floated about them. The balls hissed and crackled, and filled the street with shifting blue light. The hair on the back of Rebel’s neck rose up.

“Hey, Earth!” Rebel shouted. The creature second in line turned its head sharply. Blank, alert eyes looked at her.

Rebel turned, bent over, flipped up her cloak, and made loud farting noises with her mouth. The Comprise did not react. They continued calmly onward.

Khadijah was laughing so hard she was having trouble standing. “Oh, God, Sunshine! You’re impossible, you know that?”

The Comprise stepped onto the boardwalk and strode straight for the water’s edge. A length of railing was missing there, and the first stepped off, onto the water.

The glowing spheres of ball lightning dipped suddenly, almost to the sea’s surface, and the water sang. It rose in a bow to the Comprise’s foot, quivering like the vastly slowed vibration of a violin string.

Moving with processional dignity, the Comprise passed over the sea, the water rippling with tension under their feet. On the far side, they continued up a dark street, dwindling, growing dimmer, and finally gone to dusk.

The next day, Rebel woke up with a killer hangover.

“Ohhhh, shit.” She sat up on the edge of her cot and then bent over to clutch her head in her hands. Herstomach felt uneasy and her bowels were loose. Then she remembered farting at the Comprise, and she felt even worse.

As soon as she could, she went out to buy a liter of water.

Then she stopped at a rootworker’s shop to buy a bracelet leech, and snapped it on her upper arm. A trickle of blood began flowing through the charcoal scrubbers, to be returned to her body cleansed of fatigue poisons. By the time she got to work, she’d drunk down the water and felt almost normal.

Fortunately, things were slow at Cerebrum City.

Khadijah was already closeted with a complicated stress tune-up, and nobody else came by for the first few hours.

Rebel was grateful for that, but even when the bracelet turned blue and dropped from her arm, she felt dull and listless. It was a classic emotional hangover, the residue of having acted the fool.

Well, there was an easy solution for that.

Feeling the thrill of doing something both nasty and forbidden for the first time, Rebel broke out the programmer and ran a cleaning pad over the adhesion disks. They attached to her skin behind each ear and on her brow, like small mouths. She slapped on the reader-analyzer and riffled through the minor function wafers in the wall of boilerplate.

A clean sense of elation filled her. This was fun. She now understood that her earlier prejudice against wetprogramming had been the wizard’s daughter functions acting to protect her integrity. But this was different. So long as she didn’t try anything major, what could be the harm of it?

It would be best to be careful, though. Eucrasia had overdone it her first time—most persona bums did—and let the euphoria of success lead her into adding one alteration on top of another, building them into a nonsensical architecture of traits, until the entirestructure had collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions, and she had needed six hours wetsurgical reconstruction to bring her back to herself.

Still, the psychosomatic functions were simple enough.

Any idiot could make the brain readjust the glandular and hormonal balances of the endocrinal system and, orchestrated correctly, it would give her a terrific body high. Humming slightly to herself, she glanced up at the floating tumbleweed diagram and gave it a spin.

And stopped. Hell, that was interesting. She rotated the sphere again, more slowly this time. Yes. There was a circular structure ru

Fascinated, she slid a blank wafer into the recorder.

By the time her first client came in, she had entirely forgotten about giving herself a therapeutic body rush.

She stood, turning the professional-quality recording of her persona over and over in her hand, and thinking wonderingly that Deutsche Nakasone had been willing to kill her for this small ceramic flake. The kid entered and coughed to get her attention. He looked to be no more than fifteen. Rebel slipped the wafer into her pocket and said,

“Well, what do you want done?”

The wonderful, the magical thing about the wafer, of course, was the beautiful vistas it opened up of new psychologies, new modes of perception, entirely new structures of thought. With the skills this implied, she could create anything. Anything at all.

It was the kind of discovery that shatters old universes and opens up new ones in their place.

After work, she took the omnibus to the drop tube’s up station.

She’d put off this part of her search for as long as possible, because the drop tube was a Comprise creation, and they were likely to be all through the up station. But she was convinced now that Wyeth would not be found in Geesinkfor, that if he had ever been there he had moved on, either to another cislunar state or down to Earth.

Given Wyeth’s convictions, Earth seemed most likely.

The bus took ten minutes to reach the up station. Rebel had wired herself deadpan—emotion and expression completely divorced—and in addition to the vanitypaint on her forehead, she’d put a short black line like a dagger through her left eye. She was now the living image of a confidential courier, a minor cog in the affairs of business and state wired to wipe herself catatonic at the slightest attempt to tamper with her brain. Nobody would give her a second glance.

From the bus, the Earth was bright and glorious, as startlingly beautiful as everyone said, the wonder of the System. None of the Comprise’s works could be seen from here.